A question about what my (college) students are saying - help would be appreciated.

[Igel]

35. Eh. Ask what they mean by it.

You want to know what they mean, probing to figure out why they mean what you think they mean isn't the way to to do it.

A good friend when I was in high school adamantly denied he was Christian. He said he was Catholic. I was curious and asked.

He knew the Church's history. He knew about the Reformation. Protestantism. He defined "Christian" as what all the born-again evangelicals and charismatics were. They went around calling themselves "Christian." He wasn't one of them. He accepted their self-designation and was saying he failed to meet that definition. It didn't bother him. He was ableo to process a fairly complex and overlapping set of meaning.

When push came to shove, yeah, he said he was Christian. And the evangelicals and charismatics would almost all admit he was Christian. Didn't stop him from saying that he wasn't "Christian." The scare-quotes might make it clearer. But we only have scare-quotes and no-scare-quotes, while we'd need a few more levels of "scare-ness" in the quotes.

A lot of folk in Protestant and post-Protestant denominations can handle the same complexity. They can keep the levels of meaning straight, for the most part. Outsiders have trouble understanding them. And some insiders do, too.

My old church openly said that the Catholic church wasn't "Primitive Xianity" but was apostate. Protestantism was Catholicism warmed over lightly. Perhaps a bit better. Other churches of more recent vintage were also more recently apostate. Depending on the context, either all of them failed to be Christian; Catholics and Protestants failed to be Xian; just Catholics failed to be Xian; or all of them were Xian, but Hindus and Taoists weren't Xian.

Just ask. When you get things that don't make sense, continue to ask. Don't point out contradictions to confuse them. Learn to pose examples and see how they describe them--and be sure to get contexts straight, or ask whether they could say something and get them to provide the context.